So, what am I going to do? Well, quite plainly I don't yet have the funds or the time to set up a large webcomic site, but what I do have is a collection of interested people (that's you lovely folks reading and following this blog) who keep coming back to see and read about what I'm up to. Some may come to see the tutorials. Some may come along to read my wildly irreverent short stories or you may just be here to view my portfolio or learn more about me or just see what I have for sale in my store.
Okay that's the blatant marketing bit over with, now onto the real reason for this blog post.
I wrote and created, about thirty years ago, a series of characters and put them together into a strip that I called Pixy Wood. It was a tale about a magical community of woodland spirits; the strip had no political agenda, no cute talking dogs or cats, just a group of odd-ball, whacked out eccentric faerie folk nut-jobs who lived a simplistic life in a magical woodland. They had the odd anti hero and a lot of visiting characters who dropped by from time-to-time, just to spice things up and rattle their collective cages and lives.
The strip was very nearly picked up by King Features Syndicate, Tribune Media Services and Telegraph Syndicate. Sadly my little strip lost by one vote on the panel of adjudicators every time. But no matter what I do and no matter how I grow creatively, I've never been able to move away from my beloved little Pixy's.
I think they are just my thing.
They've been in a strip, produced as a graphic novel, were commissioned by a comic two weeks before it folded and was due for publication by an Irish publishing house just before they were acquired by a large London publisher who cancelled all their new projects, mine included. But still I refused to give in. You might say that all those near misses are what spur me on: I think that if enough people want this to happen then there must be something in it and this morning I had a bright flaring idea for what direction my strip may go.
The page set out above is just a sample. It follows no storyline or has no punchline (hence the lack of dialogue), at this stage I just wanted to see how it would look with the format of cartoons on a realistic background and more importantly, I wanted to hear what you thought of it.
I'm going to be writing a few episodes down over the next few weeks and I'll also produce them in a more traditional format, that of all cartoon as well as in the photo format illustrated above.
So please do leave a comment and let's get this ball rolling and if it grows, as I hope it will, we can all say that we were here at the very beginning.
Cheers